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2,541 articles
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Trance
22 Mar 2013
Vibrant, genre-subverting thriller contains trio of assured performances
Director Danny Boyle has a flair for making vibrant, zeitgeist-capturing films about characters in extreme situations ultimately overcoming the odds – whether it’s an Edinburgh heroin addict in Trainspotting, a teenaged Mumbai orphan accused of cheating…
King of the Travellers
22 Mar 2013
Underwhelming tale of torn loyalty, forbidden love, revenge and betrayal
Writer-director Mark O'Connor ambitiously attempts to draw on elements of Shakespearean drama and tragedy as well as the classic American cinema of the '70s for his latest film, King of The Travellers, with moderate success. For while his film does…
The Odd Life of Timothy Green
22 Mar 2013
Misguided combination of emotionally sensitive adult themes and Disney fairytale coating
Disney's The Odd Life of Timothy Green is a film as peculiar as its name suggests. But while certainly ambitious and well-meaning in concept, its execution feels a little too sentimental and contrived to be taken seriously. The film follows devoted…
Baise-Moi
22 Mar 2013
The low budget, sex and violence-filled movie is available uncut in the UK for the first time
When it comes to splitting opinion straight down the midriff, few films from the last couple of decades have been quite so marmite as Baise-Moi. For some, this low-budget French movie from 2000 was simply a porno with a bit more story than usual. For…
Mission to Lars
22 Mar 2013
Documentary about a Fragile X Syndrome sufferer's obsession with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich
This isn’t really a film about Metallica. Even though the metal behemoth’s shadow looms large over the entire documentary, don’t expect the warts and all melodrama of Some Kind of Monster. However if you do love the mighty ‘tallica you might find even…
Broken
19 Mar 2013
Wildly melodramatic and stereotypical issue-based drama, starring Cillian Murphy and Tim Roth
Single parent families, sexually aware teenagers, people with mental health issues; they’re all just short-fused firecrackers ready to explode in director Rufus Norris’s frustratingly issue-based drama. Funded by the BBC and the British Film Council…
Flying Blind
19 Mar 2013
A quietly intriguing drama about an English aerospace engineer with a young, Arab boyfriend
Professional reserve crumbles in the face of an overwhelming romance in Flying Blind, a modest but engrossing micro-budget first feature from director Katarzyna Klimkiewicz. Although there is nothing here that would not sit comfortably on the small…
Jack the Giant Slayer
19 Mar 2013
Bryan Singer's adaptation is a decent enough storybook yarn, if a little too earnest
Judging by the early word from the US, where this blockbuster fairytale has performed poorly at the box office, you’d think it was a flop of gigantic proportions. It may not be on a par with director Bryan Singer’s X-Men films, but Jack the Giant Slayer…
Post Tenebras Lux
18 Mar 2013
A probing, ambitious and frequently exasperating work from Mexican visionary Carlos Reygadas
The marvellous Mexican director Carlos Reygadas (Japon, Battle in Heaven, Silent Light) is a filmmaker given to making films that jar. Whether it is a suicidal solitary having sex with a woman in her mid-seventies or the aloof sex club where the central…
Red Dawn
15 Mar 2013
Stunt coordinator of Bourne movies delivers compromised invasion remake
“North Korea? It doesn't make any sense!” So exclaims Josh Peck as he watches enemy soldiers swarm his hometown. Yet with Kim Jong-un currently flexing his military muscles between watching basketball games with Dennis Rodman, this compromised remake…
The Croods
14 Mar 2013
DreamWorks' prehistoric cartoon ploughs coming-of-age furrow with little sophistication
A prehistoric cartoon set around the adventures of a family, The Croods is always going to draw comparisons to The Flintstones, though this DreamWorks-produced 3D title is somewhat different from the Hanna-Barbera classic. Here, there are no stone-age…
One Mile Away
14 Mar 2013
Heartfelt documentary from Penny Woolcock about gang violence in Birmingham
Winner of the Michael Powell award at last summer’s Edinburgh Film Festival, Penny Woolcock’s heartfelt if sometimes naïve documentary charts the efforts by representatives of two notorious inner-Birmingham street gangs, the Burger Bar Boys and the…
The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
13 Mar 2013
Laughs are lacking in this tale of rival Vegas magicians, starring Steve Carell and Jim Carrey
After competing dramas about competing magicians (The Prestige and The Illusionist) comes the same idea played for broad laughs. Given that Vegas-style showmanship is ridiculously campy anyway, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone has a large…
Maniac
13 Mar 2013
Gratuitous slasher remake with a lead performance by Elijah Wood
This slasher remake takes the concept of William Lustig’s controversial 1980 original, focusing on Frank, a loner sociopath who brutally murders beautiful women, and increases the repellent-factor by virtue of a much higher gore budget and a decision to…
Identity Thief
12 Mar 2013
Solid comedy road movie with Melissa McCarthy and Jason Bateman
‘You follow the rules? How’s that workin’ out for you?’ bawls Melissa McCarthy’s shameless criminal when straight-laced accountant Sandy Patterson (Jason Bateman) catches up with her free-spending ways with his money. Seth Gordon’s follow up to…
Compliance
12 Mar 2013
Frustrating drama reconstructing the infamous Mount Washington strip-search incident
Writer/director Craig Zobel’s indie drama is a low-key reconstruction of the infamous Mount Washington McDonald’s strip-search incident, one of a series attributed to an anonymous prank-caller. Zobel makes a bold decision not to address any wider…
Michael H - Profession: Director
8 Mar 2013
A limited portrait of the austere Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke
This French documentary about the Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke convincingly argues Haneke is one of the most important and idiosyncratic filmmakers working today. Writer-director Yves Montmayeur’s doc also makes the more interesting point that…
Parker
8 Mar 2013
Lax plotting lets down this crime caper starring Jason Statham and Jennifer Lopez
If there’s one thing to be gleaned from the late Donald E Westlake’s hard-boiled Parker novels (written under the pseudonym Richard Stark) and the movies inspired by them, it’s that there’s no honour among thieves. Parker is a career criminal with a…
Oz the Great and Powerful
8 Mar 2013
An action-packed spectacle of a prequel, starring James Franco, Michelle Williams and Mila Kunis
This prequel to The Wizard of Oz might have been little more than an expensive special effects extravaganza were it not in the hands of a director with as distinctive a visual style and flair for knockabout comedy as Sam Raimi. As with Tim Burton’s…
Good Vibrations
8 Mar 2013
Inspiring biopic of Belfast punk record label owner Terri Hooley
In 1970s Belfast, as sectarian conflict escalated into terrorism and murder, Terri Hooley decided to open a record shop on the battle-scarred high street. 'One love' was his declaration, and Good Vibrations was the name of the store. The store birthed a…
Babeldom
6 Mar 2013
A rich documentary meditating on the future of urban life from filmmaker Paul Bush
A science fiction film using buildings of today, or a documentary about tomorrow? Paul Bush’s Babeldom might be the first film to use the laws of thermodynamics as a denouement, as the film wonders quite literally what our world is coming to. With the…
The Place Beyond the Pines
5 Mar 2013
Ambitious thriller from the director of Blue Valentine, starring Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper
Reteaming Ryan Gosling with his Blue Valentine writer/director Derek Cianfrance, The Place Beyond the Pines is a thriller with a higher pedigree than most, with impressive support from Bradley Cooper, Eva Mendes, Rose Byrne and Ray Liotta. The result is…
Fire with Fire
4 Mar 2013
Dull action revenge flick starring Bruce Willis and Josh Duhamel
Oh, Josh Duhamel – is there nothing you can do? In between contributing nothing much to each instalment of the Transformers series, he has popped up in low-to-middling romantic ventures like Safe Haven and New Year’s Eve. He even joined the cast of this…
The Guilt Trip
4 Mar 2013
Heartfelt mother-son road trip movie starring Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen
Teaming Barbra Streisand with Seth Rogen promises a road trip worth avoiding; setting the diva who produced and starred in a slew of vanity projects including The Prince of Tides and The Mirror As Two Faces opposite the shambolic stoner from Knocked Up…
The ABCs of Death
28 Feb 2013
The 26 part horror anthology screened as part of FrightFest at Glasgow Film Festival 2013
26 shorts about death all rolled into just over two hours, as a horde of horror directors from around the world each pick a letter, assign an appropriate deathly demise to said letter, then make a (roughly) four minute film. As with all anthologies the…
